Chapter Two: Training Interlude

Harry had no time to pay attention to the Dursleys that summer - which was a lucky thing, as they spent most of their time ignoring him out of fear and anger anyway. They said nothing to him about his new appearance and his sudden healthier growth spurt with the cosmetics potions, he said nothing to them about his newfound magic and what had happened between them that night in the hut on the sea rock, and each kept a cold distance from the other.

Harry kept to his room with his new snowy owl for company. He had decided to call her Hedwig, a name he had found in A History of Magic.

I can definitely see you as the type of person to give people elegant, obscure names from distant literary and historical figures you've never met, Hermione wrote to him. You have that kind of elegant aura to you.

Hermione had been as good as her word. Harry wrote to her, hesitant, and to his delight he received an almost immediate response back. He and Hermione took up correspondence over the summer, competing to see who could learn a spell or potion the fastest, or who could read the most pages in a single night.

I frankly expected this to be horrible, but it's all so interesting! Harry wrote to her, delighted.

Hermione taught him loads of great study and magic learning techniques, now that he took the time to sit down and listen to her - along with loads of training in hard work. Being as brilliant as Hermione took effort and patience, but Harry, fascinated by his brand-new world and desperate to fit in there, was willing to put in the time and effort, to establish the good habits that could carry through into his school career.

And so he quickly devoured books, not only on school subjects - memorizing vocabulary, digesting important pieces of information - but on subjects like Hogwarts, wizarding world culture, wizarding world international relations, and wizarding world history.

More delightfully, he practiced magic, from spellwork to potion-brewing. He and Hermione competed to see how many spells and potions they could learn ahead of time by the time the summer was up. He practiced for countless hours in his bedroom, Hedwig flying in and out of the open window as she pleased with brand-new letters from Hermione.

Harry and Hermione each learned a lot about how the other did magic.

Hermione was very by the book. On the one hand, she was absolutely brilliant, capable of digesting and reading back whole texts, of memorizing and perfecting anything written inside a tome by an expert on the subject. She was excellent at following the rules of magic to the letter, and getting picture-perfect results. Not only that, but she could use those picture-perfect results cleverly. She was, however, more book-based than practically-based, more thought-based than observational.

But Harry - who had also begun reading his horrors, his mysteries, and his magical nonfiction theory - was good at finding the rules and then creatively breaking them. He learned a healthy respect for the rules from Hermione, but he was more of a take them or leave them kind of wizard. He learned very quickly from his own individual extra studies how to be artful, how to break the rules in a way that produced better results, how to be creative and produce the new and the innovative on instinct. His wand was wonderful here. Of course, this did take lots of informational knowledge first, but it was still an important difference between himself and Hermione. Harry was even more interested in supposedly forbidden knowledge than Hermione was. And Harry was more practically-based than book-based, more observational than thought-based.

There were more differences. They went through mock magical scenarios together, and while Hermione was good at logistics (managing her resources perfectly), Harry was better at strategy (using his resources for battle-ready effect). Hermione thought things through more, but Harry thought better on his feet.

By the end of the summer, they had the entire first year damn near perfect. I hope this will be enough to get started, each wrote at one point worriedly to the other, not really knowing what to expect from actual ordinary students when they got to Hogwarts.

For they had formed a healthy respect for one another. They frustrated each other at times, their ways of learning were so different, but they were also strikingly good together and strikingly good for each other. Hermione informed Harry that Wendell had begun referring to them as the Two-Headed Monster, and Harry smiled at that letter and kept it when he read it.

I wish I were with your family, he wrote back to her longingly. He did reveal to her a lot about how the Dursleys treated him, and Hermione grew to dislike them a great deal. She promised to keep Harry's secrets, and shared little bits of normal Granger life with him. The Grangers were fairly wealthy themselves, and a very quiet, kind, warm, intellectual little family.

Harry and Hermione even began plans for how they would meet up on the day of at the station. Harry had read about a wizarding Britain bus route, the Daze and Knight bus routes, and he planned to use some of his remaining coins to leave the Dursley house very early and take the bus to Kings Cross Station in London on the day of. Hermione would be waiting for him there, and as McGonagall had told her about on the day she gave Hermione her letter, together with Hermione's parents they would go through the barrier together.

They also shared their new wizarding music favorites - Harry's punk rock and Hermione's soft jazz. Hermione in turn talked about her romances, just as Harry had talked about his books, and Harry grew a healthy understanding and respect for the more feminine or romantic perspective. They shared their awe over the wizarding pictures and photographs they saw that moved to a two-dimensional type of life Charm. And they shared information they'd heard on the WWN radio, from the news of the mysterious and unsolved summer break-in at Gringotts to the vault that had been emptied earlier that very same day, to their favorite wizarding skits and Quidditch sports teams.

They slowly learned the rules of Quidditch, a broom-based sport, from listening in on match commentary. Hermione's favorite team became the Holyhead Harpies because they were a fierce and hardcore all-woman team; Harry formed a fondness for the cheerful Irish Kenmare Kestrels in their green robes, who always played music before a match. Both teams seemed in general to do fairly well, so neither had much to complain about.

Every evening, Harry ticked off another day on the calendar he had pinned to the wall, counting down to the day he would be arriving at Kings Cross - September the first.